3°9

By Richard Le Gallienne

in vain that she implored him, with tears in her eyes, to fall in love
with some other woman. She, she alone, he said, must be his
inspiration ; but as the domesticated muse is too often a muse of
exquisite silence, too happy to sing its happiness, this lawful
passion, which might otherwise have been turned to account, was
unproductive too.

“And such a pretty woman,” said the editor sympathetically.
Of another happier case of domestic hallucination, he made the
remark : “ Says he owes it all to his wife ! and you never saw
such a plain woman in your life.”

“ How do you know she is plain ? ” I asked; “ mayn’t it be that
the husband’s sense of beauty is finer than yours ? Do you think
all beauty is for all men ? or that the beauty all can see is best
worth seeing ? ”

And then we spoke the words of wisdom and wit which I have
written in ebony on the lintel of this little house of words. He
who would write to live must talk to write, and I confess that I
took up this point with my friend, and continued to stick to it,
no doubt to his surprise, because I had at the moment some star-
dust on the subject nebulously streaming and circling through my
mind, which I was anxious to shape into something of an ordered
world. So I talked not to hear myself speak, but to hear myself
think, always, I will anticipate the malicious reader in saying, an
operation of my mind of delightful unexpectedness.

“ Why ! you’re actually thinking,” chuckles one’s brain to itself,
“go on. Dance while the music’s playing,” and so the tongue
goes dancing with pretty partners of words, till suddenly one’s
brain gives a sigh, the wheels begin to slow down, and music and
dancing stop together, till some chance influence, a sound, a face,
a flower, how or whence we know not, comes to wind it up
again.

The